M L Stevens
Biographic Data
| ID | 193100 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M L Stevens |
| GIVEN NAMES | M L |
| FAMILY NAME | Stevens |
| SIGNATURE | STEVENS M L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2194-9226 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1280 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
What was the Cold War? Theorizing a Medium Durée: Introduction to a special issue of Social Science History, ‘What Was the Cold War?’
The ontological complexity of the twentieth-century Cold War motivates this special issue’s investigation of how social scientists conceptualize institutional novelty and change. We begin by noting the peculiar elision of the Cold War as an explanatory mechanism in mainstream sociology, even while sociologists have theoretical tools for making sense of the phenomenon: war , schema , field , world systems , and empire . All are useful; none are su…
Neither state nor market: Competitive Emulation in Higher Education
For two centuries, academics and their universities have competed for prominence and vied to demonstrate that their institutions are at the center of the scholarly world. Scientific advances in particular fields, reciprocal academic visits and conferences, impressive physical architecture, and publishing in shared venues and a lingua franca are among the many dimensions in which universities seek prestige in a relational status system. We call th…
Financing Higher Education in America
Application essays and the ritual production of merit in US selective admissions
US colleges and universities are defined by their exclusivity, and the most prestigious schools reject most of those who apply. Yet these same schools also widely advertise their inclusiveness, encouraging students from all backgrounds to submit applications and highlighting evaluation protocols that identify many characteristics worthy of consideration for admission. We surface this paradox and use it as motivation to theorize a little studied c…
Should I Start at Math 101? Content Repetition as an Academic Strategy in Elective Curriculums
How do undergraduates make their first course decisions, and are these decisions fateful? Drawing on serial interviews (N = 200) of 53 students at an admissions-selective university, we show that incoming students with disparate precollege experiences differ in their orientations toward and strategies for considering first college math courses. Content repeaters opt for courses that repeat material covered in prior coursework, whereas novices opt…
Ambiguous Credentials: How Learners Use and Make Sense of Massively Open Online Courses
Researchers have investigated the demography and styles of engagement of those who enroll in MOOCs but have lent little attention to how learners navigate MOOCs’ ambiguity as academic certifications. Analyzing semi-structured interviews with 60 people who devoted substantial time to at least one MOOC between 2014–2017, we find that people use MOOCs to build skills for application at work and home, build relationships, navigate life transitions, a…
Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary
What is educational entrepreneurship? Strategic action, temporality, and the expansion of US higher education
The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior scholarship names academic leaders as key drivers of this expansion, yet the conditions for the possibility and fate of their activity remain under-specified. We fill this gap by theorizing what Randall Collins first callededucational entrepreneurshipas a special kind of strate…
Universities as peculiar organizations
We integrate contemporary sociological scholarship on higher education to appraise universities as peculiar organizations, on three dimensions. Universities are positionally central to the institutional order of modern societies, providing working links between state, market, civil society, and private‐sphere organizations. Universities are polysemic , embodying civic, economic, and sacred meanings simultaneously. And universities are quasi‐sover…
Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era
From Soldiers to Students: The Tests of General Educational Development (GED) as Diplomatic Measurement
The GI Bill's college-attendance provisions posed an evaluation problem. How would returning veterans, most of whom were without high school diplomas, be judged fit for college? Drawing from a variety of primary source material from the years surrounding the close of World War II, we show how leaders in government, the military, and academia cooperated to produce a measure of college fitness that would deem virtually all veterans fit for college …
The Evaluation Machine
Association, Service, Market: Higher Education in American Political Development
US higher education has enjoyed growing attention from social scientists and historians. We integrate recent scholarship by framing a political and historical sociology of the sector. We show how higher education has been central to projects of nation building and social provision throughout the course of American political development. US higher education has three institutional configurations: an associational one, defined by voluntary intermur…
Football as a Status System in U.S. Higher Education
Sociologists have focused almost exclusively on academic aspects of status in higher education, despite the prominence of nonacademic activities, specifically athletics, in U.S. colleges and universities. We use the case of football to investigate whether intercollegiate sports influence the distribution of status in U.S. higher education. Analyzing data on conference affiliations and other organizational characteristics of 287 schools over time,…
Culture and Education
The author reviews the primary frameworks through which North American sociologists have conceived of the relation between formal education and culture and explains how sociologists' preponderant conception of formal schooling as an individual-level phenomenon and a metrical quantity has come to constrain intellectual progress in much of the subfield. The author offers two analytic strategies that might help loosen this constraint
A Sociology of Quantification
One of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena, yet sociologists generally have paid little attention to the spread of quantification or the significance of new regimes of measurement. Our article addresses this oversight by analyzing quantification - the production and communication of numbers - as a general sociological phenome…
Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub: Empirical and Theoretical Advances in the Sociology of Higher Education
Higher education lacks an intellectually coherent sociology; varied research on colleges and universities is dispersed widely throughout the discipline. This review initiates a critical integration of this scholarship. We argue that sociologists have conceived of higher education systems as sieves for sorting and stratifying populations, incubators for the development of competent social actors, temples for the legitimation of official knowledge,…
Creating a Class
For a year and a half, Stevens worked in the admissions office of a New England college known for high academic standards, a beautiful campus, and social conscience. Ambitious high schoolers and savvy guidance counselors know that admission here is highly competitive. But creating classes, Stevens finds, is more complicated than most imagine.
Schooling, Home
Home schooling, the practice of educating one's own children, has seen dramatic growth in the last three decades, and has transformed from a peculiarly American innovation to a truly global movement. An estimated 15,000 US children were home schooled in the late 1970s; by 2003 the number was over a million, and the practice had won adherents throughout the industrialized world (National Center for Education Statistics 2004; Stevens 2003). Parent‐…
Commensuration as a Social Process
Although it is evident in routine decision-making and a crucial vehicle of rationalization, commensuration as a general social process has been given little consideration by sociologists. This article defines commensuration as the comparison of different entities according to a common metric, notes commensuration's long history as an instrument of social thought, analyzes commensuration as a mode of power, and discusses the cognitive and politica…
Caring for the Organization: Social Workers as Frontline Risk Managers in Neonatal Intensive Care Units
Though both sociologists of the professions and social workers themselves would predict that social work will be concentrated where there is social 'trouble,' neither can fully account for variations in the allocation of social work and the mix of social work tasks we observed. Using our research in neonatal intensive care units, we offer an account of social work as organizationally based caring. We argue that social workers are interactional an…
Aids: The Challenge
Behind the Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America.Magali Sarfatti Larson
Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form.Susan Krieger
Journals of the House of Representatives, 1789-1790
Commensuration as a Social Process
Although it is evident in routine decision-making and a crucial vehicle of rationalization, commensuration as a general social process has been given little consideration by sociologists. This article defines commensuration as the comparison of different entities according to a common metric, notes commensuration's long history as an instrument of social thought, analyzes commensuration as a mode of power, and discusses the cognitive and politica…
A Sociology of Quantification
One of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena, yet sociologists generally have paid little attention to the spread of quantification or the significance of new regimes of measurement. Our article addresses this oversight by analyzing quantification - the production and communication of numbers - as a general sociological phenome…
Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub: Empirical and Theoretical Advances in the Sociology of Higher Education
Higher education lacks an intellectually coherent sociology; varied research on colleges and universities is dispersed widely throughout the discipline. This review initiates a critical integration of this scholarship. We argue that sociologists have conceived of higher education systems as sieves for sorting and stratifying populations, incubators for the development of competent social actors, temples for the legitimation of official knowledge,…
Association, Service, Market: Higher Education in American Political Development
US higher education has enjoyed growing attention from social scientists and historians. We integrate recent scholarship by framing a political and historical sociology of the sector. We show how higher education has been central to projects of nation building and social provision throughout the course of American political development. US higher education has three institutional configurations: an associational one, defined by voluntary intermur…
Culture and Education
The author reviews the primary frameworks through which North American sociologists have conceived of the relation between formal education and culture and explains how sociologists' preponderant conception of formal schooling as an individual-level phenomenon and a metrical quantity has come to constrain intellectual progress in much of the subfield. The author offers two analytic strategies that might help loosen this constraint
Caring for the Organization: Social Workers as Frontline Risk Managers in Neonatal Intensive Care Units
Though both sociologists of the professions and social workers themselves would predict that social work will be concentrated where there is social 'trouble,' neither can fully account for variations in the allocation of social work and the mix of social work tasks we observed. Using our research in neonatal intensive care units, we offer an account of social work as organizationally based caring. We argue that social workers are interactional an…
Should I Start at Math 101? Content Repetition as an Academic Strategy in Elective Curriculums
How do undergraduates make their first course decisions, and are these decisions fateful? Drawing on serial interviews (N = 200) of 53 students at an admissions-selective university, we show that incoming students with disparate precollege experiences differ in their orientations toward and strategies for considering first college math courses. Content repeaters opt for courses that repeat material covered in prior coursework, whereas novices opt…
Football as a Status System in U.S. Higher Education
Sociologists have focused almost exclusively on academic aspects of status in higher education, despite the prominence of nonacademic activities, specifically athletics, in U.S. colleges and universities. We use the case of football to investigate whether intercollegiate sports influence the distribution of status in U.S. higher education. Analyzing data on conference affiliations and other organizational characteristics of 287 schools over time,…
Universities as peculiar organizations
We integrate contemporary sociological scholarship on higher education to appraise universities as peculiar organizations, on three dimensions. Universities are positionally central to the institutional order of modern societies, providing working links between state, market, civil society, and private‐sphere organizations. Universities are polysemic , embodying civic, economic, and sacred meanings simultaneously. And universities are quasi‐sover…
Application essays and the ritual production of merit in US selective admissions
US colleges and universities are defined by their exclusivity, and the most prestigious schools reject most of those who apply. Yet these same schools also widely advertise their inclusiveness, encouraging students from all backgrounds to submit applications and highlighting evaluation protocols that identify many characteristics worthy of consideration for admission. We surface this paradox and use it as motivation to theorize a little studied c…
What is educational entrepreneurship? Strategic action, temporality, and the expansion of US higher education
The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior scholarship names academic leaders as key drivers of this expansion, yet the conditions for the possibility and fate of their activity remain under-specified. We fill this gap by theorizing what Randall Collins first callededucational entrepreneurshipas a special kind of strate…
From Soldiers to Students: The Tests of General Educational Development (GED) as Diplomatic Measurement
The GI Bill's college-attendance provisions posed an evaluation problem. How would returning veterans, most of whom were without high school diplomas, be judged fit for college? Drawing from a variety of primary source material from the years surrounding the close of World War II, we show how leaders in government, the military, and academia cooperated to produce a measure of college fitness that would deem virtually all veterans fit for college …
Ambiguous Credentials: How Learners Use and Make Sense of Massively Open Online Courses
Researchers have investigated the demography and styles of engagement of those who enroll in MOOCs but have lent little attention to how learners navigate MOOCs’ ambiguity as academic certifications. Analyzing semi-structured interviews with 60 people who devoted substantial time to at least one MOOC between 2014–2017, we find that people use MOOCs to build skills for application at work and home, build relationships, navigate life transitions, a…
Journals of the House of Representatives, 1789-1790
Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form.Susan Krieger
Aids: The Challenge
Behind the Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America.Magali Sarfatti Larson
Caring for the Organization: Social Workers as Frontline Risk Managers in Neonatal Intensive Care Units
Though both sociologists of the professions and social workers themselves would predict that social work will be concentrated where there is social 'trouble,' neither can fully account for variations in the allocation of social work and the mix of social work tasks we observed. Using our research in neonatal intensive care units, we offer an account of social work as organizationally based caring. We argue that social workers are interactional an…
Commensuration as a Social Process
Although it is evident in routine decision-making and a crucial vehicle of rationalization, commensuration as a general social process has been given little consideration by sociologists. This article defines commensuration as the comparison of different entities according to a common metric, notes commensuration's long history as an instrument of social thought, analyzes commensuration as a mode of power, and discusses the cognitive and politica…
Creating a Class
For a year and a half, Stevens worked in the admissions office of a New England college known for high academic standards, a beautiful campus, and social conscience. Ambitious high schoolers and savvy guidance counselors know that admission here is highly competitive. But creating classes, Stevens finds, is more complicated than most imagine.
Schooling, Home
Home schooling, the practice of educating one's own children, has seen dramatic growth in the last three decades, and has transformed from a peculiarly American innovation to a truly global movement. An estimated 15,000 US children were home schooled in the late 1970s; by 2003 the number was over a million, and the practice had won adherents throughout the industrialized world (National Center for Education Statistics 2004; Stevens 2003). Parent‐…
Culture and Education
The author reviews the primary frameworks through which North American sociologists have conceived of the relation between formal education and culture and explains how sociologists' preponderant conception of formal schooling as an individual-level phenomenon and a metrical quantity has come to constrain intellectual progress in much of the subfield. The author offers two analytic strategies that might help loosen this constraint
A Sociology of Quantification
One of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena, yet sociologists generally have paid little attention to the spread of quantification or the significance of new regimes of measurement. Our article addresses this oversight by analyzing quantification - the production and communication of numbers - as a general sociological phenome…
Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub: Empirical and Theoretical Advances in the Sociology of Higher Education
Higher education lacks an intellectually coherent sociology; varied research on colleges and universities is dispersed widely throughout the discipline. This review initiates a critical integration of this scholarship. We argue that sociologists have conceived of higher education systems as sieves for sorting and stratifying populations, incubators for the development of competent social actors, temples for the legitimation of official knowledge,…
Football as a Status System in U.S. Higher Education
Sociologists have focused almost exclusively on academic aspects of status in higher education, despite the prominence of nonacademic activities, specifically athletics, in U.S. colleges and universities. We use the case of football to investigate whether intercollegiate sports influence the distribution of status in U.S. higher education. Analyzing data on conference affiliations and other organizational characteristics of 287 schools over time,…
Association, Service, Market: Higher Education in American Political Development
US higher education has enjoyed growing attention from social scientists and historians. We integrate recent scholarship by framing a political and historical sociology of the sector. We show how higher education has been central to projects of nation building and social provision throughout the course of American political development. US higher education has three institutional configurations: an associational one, defined by voluntary intermur…
From Soldiers to Students: The Tests of General Educational Development (GED) as Diplomatic Measurement
The GI Bill's college-attendance provisions posed an evaluation problem. How would returning veterans, most of whom were without high school diplomas, be judged fit for college? Drawing from a variety of primary source material from the years surrounding the close of World War II, we show how leaders in government, the military, and academia cooperated to produce a measure of college fitness that would deem virtually all veterans fit for college …
The Evaluation Machine
Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era
Universities as peculiar organizations
We integrate contemporary sociological scholarship on higher education to appraise universities as peculiar organizations, on three dimensions. Universities are positionally central to the institutional order of modern societies, providing working links between state, market, civil society, and private‐sphere organizations. Universities are polysemic , embodying civic, economic, and sacred meanings simultaneously. And universities are quasi‐sover…
Ambiguous Credentials: How Learners Use and Make Sense of Massively Open Online Courses
Researchers have investigated the demography and styles of engagement of those who enroll in MOOCs but have lent little attention to how learners navigate MOOCs’ ambiguity as academic certifications. Analyzing semi-structured interviews with 60 people who devoted substantial time to at least one MOOC between 2014–2017, we find that people use MOOCs to build skills for application at work and home, build relationships, navigate life transitions, a…
Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary
What is educational entrepreneurship? Strategic action, temporality, and the expansion of US higher education
The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior scholarship names academic leaders as key drivers of this expansion, yet the conditions for the possibility and fate of their activity remain under-specified. We fill this gap by theorizing what Randall Collins first callededucational entrepreneurshipas a special kind of strate…
Application essays and the ritual production of merit in US selective admissions
US colleges and universities are defined by their exclusivity, and the most prestigious schools reject most of those who apply. Yet these same schools also widely advertise their inclusiveness, encouraging students from all backgrounds to submit applications and highlighting evaluation protocols that identify many characteristics worthy of consideration for admission. We surface this paradox and use it as motivation to theorize a little studied c…
Should I Start at Math 101? Content Repetition as an Academic Strategy in Elective Curriculums
How do undergraduates make their first course decisions, and are these decisions fateful? Drawing on serial interviews (N = 200) of 53 students at an admissions-selective university, we show that incoming students with disparate precollege experiences differ in their orientations toward and strategies for considering first college math courses. Content repeaters opt for courses that repeat material covered in prior coursework, whereas novices opt…
Neither state nor market: Competitive Emulation in Higher Education
For two centuries, academics and their universities have competed for prominence and vied to demonstrate that their institutions are at the center of the scholarly world. Scientific advances in particular fields, reciprocal academic visits and conferences, impressive physical architecture, and publishing in shared venues and a lingua franca are among the many dimensions in which universities seek prestige in a relational status system. We call th…
Financing Higher Education in America
What was the Cold War? Theorizing a Medium Durée: Introduction to a special issue of Social Science History, ‘What Was the Cold War?’
The ontological complexity of the twentieth-century Cold War motivates this special issue’s investigation of how social scientists conceptualize institutional novelty and change. We begin by noting the peculiar elision of the Cold War as an explanatory mechanism in mainstream sociology, even while sociologists have theoretical tools for making sense of the phenomenon: war , schema , field , world systems , and empire . All are useful; none are su…
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (8 works) · Social science (8 works) · Higher Education Governance and Development (7 works) · Psychology (7 works)